Monday, February 23, 2015

Last week two Army whistleblowers have gone public with their personal observations and experience as research professors at the US Army War College boldly announcing to the world that the US Army is full of liars. Drs. Leonard Wong and Stephen J. Gerras, both fellow West Point graduates and career Army officers who at one time taught leadership at their alma mater, have written a 52-page monograph entitled “Lying to Ourselves: Dishonesty in the Army Profession.” It criticizes US military leadership for its grossly rampant failure to be honest. In order to improve the corruption they have encountered, from inside the Army’s research center and military graduate school on leadership, they write:

Untruthfulness is surprisingly common in the U.S. military even though members of the

profession are loath to admit it. Further, much of the deception and dishonesty that occurs in the

profession of arms is actually encouraged and sanctioned by the military institution.

Wong and Gerras cite the undue pressures placed on military officers of lower ranks ensuring that their troops, duties and/or workloads are maintaining the high standards of performance required. systematically causes them to project overly-inflated, false renditions. In such a rigid, hierarchically structured chain of command as found in the US Army, subordinates will tend to resort to great lengths to deceptively cover up the truth for purposes of appearance sake. Wong and Gerras add:

Until a candid exchange begins within the Army that includes recognition of the rampant

duplicity, the current culture will not improve…The end result is a profession whose members

often hold and propagate a false sense of integrity that prevents the profession from addressing -

or even acknowledging - the duplicity and deceit throughout the formation.

No sooner was the unflattering War College report released, Veterans Today stated that its efforts to run the public document were initially hacked by the government’s cyber-warfare brigade. Even The Daily Mail got attacked by viruses. Without a virus, it’s available in pdf here.

David Swanson in his powerful article “US Army Claims to be Full of Liars” takes the two Army critics to task by confronting the circumspect, narrow domain of deception perpetrated by the Army to just hiding less than stellar performance records. He asks what about the constant lying to Congress and the nation about wars being winnable, about the depraved war crime cover-ups, about the sinister truth of Empire wars themselves? This overt avoidance of honestly taking on the bigger lack of moral truth that Wong and Gerras have selectively omitted from their report, their refusal to be honest in Swanson’s wordsabout“the mission of mass murder - makes them ‘ethically numb.’” His point is well taken as Swanson calls them out, “You’re lying to yourselves.”

State Department whistleblower Matthew Hoh spells out the truth in more detail:

The culture of lying that is endemic and systemic in the Army, as found by researchers with the

Army War College, finds its expression in America’s pointless wars, a one trillion dollar-a-year,

pork-filled and inauditable national security budget, chronic veteran suicides, an expanded and

more globally robust international terrorist movement, and untold suffering of millions of people

and political chaos throughout the Greater Middle East perpetuated by our war policies.

Ask any veterans and even active duty personnel anonymously about truth in the military and the majority will overwhelmingly report that honesty is a foreign word in their leaders’ vocabulary as well as their behavior, particularly the military’s top leadership. The professors’ timely paper underscores the current vacuum of honesty and integrity that’s at the heart of today’s crisis in leadership in this nation. From our military leaders to political leaders to our corporate leaders to our courts, academia, medicine, virtually across the boards – leaders all lie because it’s a mandatory requirement in order to function in the morally polluted environment and thoroughly broken system in which they have so cunningly navigated to the very top echelons of power. To reach the pinnacle point in this power pyramid operating in both America and throughout the globe, one must be a psychopathic, power-craving, power-lusting liar. Every successful player in this closed, insulated system if they were honest for once would admit this truth that virtually everyone else outside the system has plainly come to see for many decades. But then it’s the nature of the beast for psychopaths to habitually lie to the point they don’t even realize it.

Psychopaths pretend to have empathy but cannot actually genuinely feel how others feel, only mimic it in contrived moments and situations they sense will enhance their message, image or standing, always with the intended manipulation to gain favor, trust or power. The world of the psychopath shares elements and attributes in common with narcissists, merging their insatiable need for inflated self-importance and grandiosity with their need for control, manipulation and power over others. Anything to get ahead, playing the sycophantic game of ingratiation, means knowing how to grease up those in power so that their superiors smile favorably at their blind ambition in acknowledgement that they too are just like them, possessing all the right credentials from the same elitist schools (i.e., the Ivies, Stanford and/or West Point), all the right career assignments, punching their ticket straight up the ladder of success to the psychopathic senior club membership. This nation of ours – the United States of America – has been taken over and hijacked by this elitist group of psychopaths who lie with their every public breath they take.

As a graduate of the US Military Academy, I went to school with ex CIA Director General David Petraeus, Big Brother architect NSA Director General Keith Alexander and current top officer in the US, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey. While they were all members from the class of 1974 directly behind me, my two freshman roommates are both Council on Foreign Relations members, one the longest running commander of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars General John Abizaid and the other recent Ambassador to Afghanistan General Karl Eikenberry. Having underwent the same education and leadership training as this card carrying who’s who of elitists busily pushing us off the doomsday cliff, I saw firsthand how military leaders from the get-go are groomed, spawned and rewarded not for their honesty or integrity but for how well they play the psychopathic lying game to success. Though on our first day as cadets we all took oaths swearing to comply with both our Cadet Honor Code to never to lie, cheat or steal as well as defend and protect our nation’s Constitution, in practice particularly once officers in the US military, honesty and protecting our civil liberties all go right out the window.

Because as a cadet I quickly realized brainwashing our future leaders into unthinking, robotic killing machines is not the best way to teach and develop positive leadership, I became an outspoken target for a tradition that had thrived at the Academy since its 1802 founding. The colonel who headed my First Regiment’s Tactical Department, in charge of instilling “discipline” within the Corps of Cadets, called into his office the major who was my tactical officer and commanded that he railroad me out of the academy in the final two weeks of the term on a series of false charges. While cadets found lying are immediately thrown out, I realized then that a blatantly hypocritical double standard existed that allowed officers to lie through their teeth in commission of their crimes directly violating my due process as a US citizen. And so on the final day, they nailed me for a bogus offense that put me five demerits over the allowable limit of 102 for the six month term.

Because I was at the end of my third year, after committing command conspiracy and falsifying my demerits, the Army was about to commit double punishment by demoting me to private in the Army for the next four years when I had only one year left to graduation. I proceeded to charge West Point with failure to allow due process of law in their haste to rid itself of me without the opportunity to present my side of the story. In July 1972 the Honorable Judge Charles Brieant presiding in the New York City federal district court ruled in my favor and reinstated me pending the outcome of a “fair hearing” back at West Point where I would later exercise my due process right in challenging the false demerits including witnesses testifying on my behalf. I became the first cadet ever to beat the inhumane, unjust West Point system after 170 years of operating above constitutional law. Hundreds of former cadets over the last couple centuries had been victims of dishonest officers who misused their abusive power and authority by unfairly aborting their education and destroying their short-lived military careers. Early on from my military experience I learned the top leaders in the Army are grossly lacking in both integrity and honesty.

At the same time that officers at West Point systematically were violating the Honor Code that I swore an oath to uphold, high ranking officers in both the Pentagon and on the ground in Vietnam for years were lying to the American public and Congress claiming the US was winning the war when every government insider knew it was a lie having drawn the opposite foregone conclusion in what came to be called the Pentagon Papers that whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg eventually leaked to the New York Times in the summer of 1971.

Moreover, all the top US Army generals were committing crimes against humanity in Vietnam wiping out village after village of up to 50,000 innocent South Vietnamese civilians from December 1968 to June 1969 as part of US war policy per Operation Speedy Express. The generals then proceeded to covering up their atrocities by constantly suppressing the evidence and repeatedly lying in boldface denial, right up until investigative journalist-author Nick Turse painstakingly compiled mountains of documented eyewitness proof in his 2013 book Kill Anything that Moves. Incentives to indiscriminately murder innocent people down to their domestic oxen to then dishonestly pad fake numbers into their all-important body count to maintain the deceitful illusion that the US was winning the war was repeated as a constant virtually throughout the Vietnam War.

The division commander of the platoon and company directly involved in the one incident that was uncovered by then New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh a year and a half after My Lai massacre, happened to be the West Point Superintendent while I was a first year cadet. For his active role in the incident’s cover-up, General Stanley Koster was demoted a star and relieved of his West Point command. His final words to the Corps of 3,800 Cadets assembled for lunch in the mess hall in March 1970 were, “Don’t let the bastards getcha down.”

Then decades later in a déjà vu moment General Petraeus was following his lying West Point predecessors General William Westmoreland and Creighton Abrams by also lying to Congress and the nation in March 2011 that we were once again winning the Afghanistan War when in fact it had become all too obvious that another long drawn out, costly US war defeat not unlike Vietnam and Iraq was in the making. With repeated lies and cover-ups characterizing the Pentagon over the decades, it comes as no surprise or actual news even to most Americans to learn of the War College professors’ conclusion that the US Army is saturated and riddled with liars from top on down.

The system has long both bred and required a culture of deception as a requisite to surviving and operating in such a morally bankrupt and corrosive organization as the US military. With more war crimes perpetuated yet again by US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, thanks to the heroic courage of Private Manning leaking evidence to Wikileaks, the world found out that the lies and cover-ups after committing countless wartime atrocities are simply what the US Empire does. In fact, it has come to be its trademark in addition to the utter destruction of the failed states it invariably leaves in its wake. Though it cost the Army whistleblower Manning 35 years of his life in prison, not one of the thousands of US military war criminals have spent even one day in jail.

Then more war crimes were exposed in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal that broke in 2005. General Petraeus was already knee deep in that debacle. In charge of training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005 to take over the dozens of detainment centers strewn throughout Iraq, the war crime trio Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld sent to Iraq the same war criminal Colonel James Steele from the 1980’s Central American death squad commando-Iran Contra days (Reagan fondly referred to them as his “freedom fighters”) to help train yet more death squad commandos to wreak havoc in another war torn nation thirty years later. Directly under Petraeus’ command was a Colonel James H. Coffman who worked hand in hand with Steele to implement yet more brutal roundups, imprisonment, torture, and murder that the trained Shiite death squads committed against Sunnis that led directly to the out of control sectarian violence still raging in Iraq today.

Invading, occupying and warring against Third World nations that never posed any national security threat to the United States has been the American Empire’s imperialistic signature foreign policy for well over a century. Crimes against humanity have been maliciously repeated in every single war by United States armed forces. It reflects shamefully on the diabolical leaders in charge, from the commander-in-chief to his generals. So is it any wonder the US military and government are lying, murderous, treasonous psychopaths? Today this pervasive absence of morality and ethics flourishes at the top in all echelons of US government as well as the military. What Americans are facing in the fascist totalitarian oligarchy they currently find themselves living in is a militarized police state run by a rogue crime syndicate of traitorous thugs gone haywire in their ruthless tyranny who abide by no constitutional or international law. When American Empire systematically causes global destabilization, geopolitical polarization, massive impoverishment, increasing risk of nuclear war, accelerating its global agenda of implementing both slow and fast kill eugenics on the human population, lying permeates the Empire killing machine in vain effort to conceal its far greater sin of human genocide and mass murder of all planetary life on earth.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Here
we go again. The US Empire does what it does best, exporting more death,
destruction and terror around the world. On Tuesday the Obama administration
disclosed that it plans to export killer drones to its allies from Turkey to Italy to Saudi Arabia. And we
already know how that song goes. In recent years the Islamic extremists have
managed to invariably get their hands on countless weapons and arms shipments intended for our so called
allies. Be it in Iraq or Syria, arms that
were supposed to go to the Iraqi army or allied Kurds or moderate rebels in
Syria somehow always get delivered to the Islamic State extremists, the latest
US-Israeli-Saudi created terrorist monster-on- steroids.

As
an example last October an airdrop of weapons that was purported to go to the Kurds in the besieged town of Kobani in Syria to fight the
Islamic State forces ended up in the wrong hands. As recently as last month it
was discovered and reported that the US was regularly air dropping arms and supplies to the waiting Islamic State on the ground
below in Iraq. Obama’s huff and puff rhetoric about hunting down the Islamic
State in Syria in reality is merely another effectively deceptive ploy to
commit air strikes on Assad’s Syria that he couldn’t get away with the year
before right after the false flag chemical weapons attack committed by US
backed rebels (that were later renamed ISIS). So now both Israeli and US
military air strikes are taking out infrastructure inside Syria that hurts the
Syrian people, destroying oil refineries and food storage silos.

Any
true military strategist would know that if the United States actually wanted
to destroy the so called big bad enemy terrorists, the most modern and lethal
killing machine on the planet has the means to accomplish this mission within a month. But the truth is the Islamic State serves
the megalomaniacal purpose of the Empire and for that reason alone, they must
survive and be allowed to continue killing Western journalists and causing deaths of humanitarian aid workers as well as engaging in ongoing Christian cleansing
throughout the Middle East and beyond. Terror strikes deep into the psyche when
dumbed down masses are manipulated into a frenzied, frothy hate of Islam worldwide that only serves the Zionist-Empire-NATO unholy
alliance all too well.

In
between making and placing their beheading videos online, the same enemy found the time to undergo training inside our close ally Turkey’s border. With this latest announcement selling drones to US allies,
the world is supposed to feel safer now that our “trusted” friends in Turkey
and Saudi Arabia will be receiving Obama’s personal favorite form of
state-sponsored terrorism from the sky. Using the same preferred modern warfare
method that our president has envisioned killing Americans on US soil, he now plans to let others also use it to kill yet more
innocent humans.

A recent study from November 2014 revealed that less than 4% of those killed by drones
in Yemen and Pakistan were actually the targeted bad guys while over 96% of the
1,147 dead people killed in this latest sample were innocent civilians. The
January 28, 2015 tally by the Journal of Investigative Journalism brings
the total number of drone deaths in Pakistan alone to
be estimated near 4,000 victims. If the sloppy aim of the most experienced and trained
drone pilots on the planet from the CIA and US military can’t efficiently kill
the enemy, what makes anyone believe that these other nations with fewer
trained pilots will produce any better results? It's another disaster waiting
to happen.

All
we are doing by spreading terror from the skies in yet more hands around the world is increasing more
innocent victims whose family members will justifiably hate the US (and its allies)
even more. But then the Empire’s forever war on terror will be just that, with
a permanent supply of fresh new jihadist recruits signing up to kill Americans
to avenge the loss of their loved ones. And of course because history by design
is locked into a forever do-loop pattern repeating itself, our enemies will get
a hold of these made in-the-USA drones and be using them in no time on us
made-in-the-USA Americans, that is when Obama’s not already using them on us.
One can easily see the false flag scenario of a drone attack one day killing
Americans in America and then blaming it on the Moslem terrorists who
“accidentally on purpose” managed to acquire one of our own “misdirected”
killer drones. And the suicidal madness increases exponentially.

Perhaps
that’s why a year ago after the CIA-induced overthrow of the democratically
elected government in Ukraine, the US decided it was time to declare a new
enemy in cold war, part II. Once Putin reclaimed its Crimean naval base after
the Crimean people voted overwhelmingly to become part of Russia again, it's
been a propaganda war ever since. Obama and the West have been demonizing Russia once again
as the enemy through nonstop lies and false flags. But it’s not working.
With far more at stake in making Putin the enemy, Europe is currently
attempting to arrive at peace in Eastern Ukraine through diplomacy, much to Obama’s chagrin.

The
truth is the United States manufactures allies and enemies according to its
fickle, self-serving, propagandizing purpose and has absolutely no moral high
ground to stand on in a single aspect of its foreign policy. Whatever suits
global hegemony for gaining more power and control while reaping more profit
for transnational corporations and the central banking cabal is the common
thread behind everything the US government does anywhere and everywhere on
earth. That’s why America’s insane, convoluted, chaotic chessboard policy makes
allies into enemies and enemies into allies at its fleeting, imperialistic
will, amounting to pure schizoid madness. And aside from making more money for
the ruling elite, by design its intended purpose is to create conflict and war
to destabilize, destroy and impoverish every nation it touches, a la the King
Midas-in-reverse effect. And what does this demonic foreign policy have to show
for itself? Failed states in Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan along
with a faltering, choking, bankrupt US economy on the verge of total collapse.
Stay tuned for the fall of the American Empire.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.

A century ago the
fledgling, brand new “science” of psychology was still in the throes of
struggling for cultural and academic recognition, acceptance and respect as the
latest still unproven member of modern science. The Austrian neurologist
Sigmund Freud was credited as the “father of psychoanalysis.” With Freud as
psychology’s chief pioneer, the study of the mind and human behavior was then
long on theory and short on practical, evidenced-based proof. The burgeoning
academic discipline of psychology/psychiatry/psychoanalysis was still in its
infantile stage in comparison to the long established bastions of the modern
scientific method - the standard natural sciences of physics, chemistry,
biology and medicine. These physical sciences more than adequately met the rigors
of the scientific method through understanding and explaining life’s material
forms to the extent that their basic theories governed by established natural
laws of practical application produced a consensual, accurately measurable
means of both predicting and controlling matter with a very high degree of
proven success.

On the other hand,
psychology/psychiatry had no luxury of any unifying basic formulas, equations,
laws or quantitative application that could accurately predict, much less
control, human behavior. The complexity of the human mind as it relates to
behavior has always rendered prediction and control virtually impossible.
Moreover, scientific prediction and control of the human species raises all
kinds of ethical questions that run counter to democratic principles and free
will. Hence, the closest proximity to being able to collect “scientific data”
through analyzing observable behavior that could easily be quantified was
through the developing branch of psychology known as behaviorism.

Russian scientist Ivan
Pavlov with his bell and salivating dogs established the widely accepted
phenomenon linking a stimulus to a conditioned response called classical
conditioning. The seminal work of James Watson, William James and later B.F.
Skinner forwarded the notion that rigorous scientific inquiry could focus on
human behavior as the primary unit of observable analysis. Skinner’s concepts
of operant conditioning and reinforcement as the explanatory driving force
behind behavior also fit neatly alongside Freud’s rudimentary tenet that humans
are motivated by drives to seek pleasure/reward and avoid pain/punishment.
Effects of positive and negative reinforcement could readily be scientifically
measured and assessed. Thus, the behavioristic component within psychology
helped legitimize the discipline as a science.

Out of the fundamental need
to further develop the science of psychology evolving from the dominant medical
model came the related study and practice of psychiatry, trained medical
doctors who specialize in the human mind combining study of its physical correlate
the brain with behavior. Abnormal psychology developed as yet another
sub-branch within the field that delved into deviant behavior and
psychopathology. As a scientific discipline at the turn of the twentieth
century, the formalized study of the human mind and behavior in its initial
formative stages as a still wannabe science recognized only seven “known” mental disorders: mania, melancholia, monomania,
paresis, dementia, dipsomania and epilepsy.

As the functions of the
brain and its effects on abnormal behavior were further studied and delineated,
a pressing need to classify the growing number of identifiable mental disorders
manifested in 1952 with the very first published edition of the Diagnostic Statistical Method of Mental Disorders (DSM). The
American Psychiatric Association Committee on Nomenclature and Statistics in
its DSM-1 listed a total of 102 mental disorders. A half century later in
1994 the DSM-4 enumerated a whopping 365 mental maladies. And with the latest
DSM-5 out in 2013, the massive list of mental disorders is now up to 374.

The proclivity for the
psychiatric field to pathologize humans through exponentially increasing mental
disorders can be the speculated result reflecting a deepening level of
scientific knowledge, empirical evidence of society’s worsening mental health
condition and/or the increasing linkage between psychiatry and Big Pharma’s
greedy thirst for record-setting profits. The latter explanation takes into
full account the unholy marriage between psychiatry and the ever-powerful
pharmaceutical industry. Invention of new diseases leads to more Big Pharma
profit.

Moreover, the alarming
partnership merger between Big Business and Big Government combined with
America’s morphing from a deceased democratic republic into an emerging fascist
totalitarian oligarchy best illustrates this phenomenon that now has nearly
every American able to be diagnosed with a specific mental disorder. Where
there is no ethical or moral consideration for what’s best for the human
population, having this convenient DSM tool leading the mental health system to
in effect be able to certifiably declare virtually anyone with a diagnosable
mental disorder ultimately becomes the perfect vehicle/weapon for abusive
tyranny and oppression. Institutionalization in lock-up facilities like insane
asylums, prisons and FEMA camps looms large in the feds’ not-so-hidden agenda,
especially the United Nations Agenda 21.

For over two decades
Harvard psychologist
Paula Caplan has led a valiant crusade against the labeling of
humans based on the proliferation of newly identified mental disorders
dispersed by the bible for clinical diagnosis - the Diagnostic Statistical Method
of Mental Disorders. Beginning with her 1995 book They Say You’re Crazy,
Paula has long been a vocal critic of her own field of psychology and
psychiatry, more recently noting that it has come to now identify 374 specific
classifications of mental disorders according to the latest edition – 2013’s
DSM-5. Just in the prior seven years since the release of DSM-4R, she maintains
that 77 new mental disorders have sprung up joining the ever-expanding list.

Dr. Caplan cites “Pathologizing
Your Period,” as illustriously perverse evidence of the damage done
by inventing artificial mental disorders (like Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder)
that are mere natural biological functions all to enhance the profit making
machine of Big Pharma. Just to show that as a feminist she is not partial to
rushing exclusively to the aid of just her own gender, Paula Caplan cites Delusional Dominating Personality Disorder as the bogus
diagnosis directed at males. She concludes the DSM is unscientific, fails
to improve health and causes severe psychological damage to the diagnosed. The
Hippocratic Oath of “first do no harm” is fundamentally violated by mislabeling
humans in the worst possible way.

Of course the pink elephant
in every psychiatrist office is Big Pharma. In a case of clear conflict of
interest, while Big Pharma is busily funding the American Psychiatric
Association (APA), twenty white male psychiatrists from the APA full of biases
against women, minorities and the poor are misusing their paid imaginations to
creatively invent yet new mental disorders every few years. Hence, Big Pharma
and the psychiatrists behind the DSM both possess the self-serving interest to
label more people as mentally defective in order to justify giving them more
drugs. Money, profit and greed are at the root of all this horrific propaganda
and disinformation.

Because there’s so little
money to be made in prevention, efforts toward actively promoting stronger
mental and emotional health amongst our overly stressed-out populace struggling
for survival is not a high priority. The pharmaceutical and healthcare
industries are more about keeping Americans unhealthy, morbidly obese on
toxically saturated chemical diets that prove to be a breeding ground for heart
disease and cancer. To maximize Big Business profits, by design the
powers-that-be want us to continue living unhealthy lifestyles that require
long term medical care.

As a practicing licensed
psychotherapist employed in the mental health field for more than a quarter
century, I can honestly say the mental health field is no different. For years
it too has been engulfed and bought out by the sinister profit driven greed of
Big Pharma. In the same way that the US health industry is not interested in
curing cancer as a disease, as too much money is made from it, the amalgamation
of the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industry is not about preventing mental
illness, it’s about expanding and exploiting it.

The
calculated focus on “psychopathologizing” the general population to the
absurdist degree of making everyone diagnosable translates into a mentally
defective population perennially in need of a quick fix - compliments of Big
Pharma.

Misdiagnosis of mental
disorders is off the charts. The entire diagnostic system has absolutely no
scientific basis. The DSM is mere bogus propaganda. Operating as a psychiatric
Gestapo, the DSM and Big Pharma are all about power. There is no brain
pathology that can be detected by scientific medical testing. Every mental
disorder is invented. It is not like a physical disease that with tests can be
detected as real. Anyone with a license, credentials and wielding differential
power can diagnose someone as mentally ill, using it as a malicious weapon. I
found social conflict to be the crux at the root of the problem. Those who
conform and don’t make waves are considered “normal” and those who do not
conform and express a mind and will of their own are typically labeled deviant,
abnormal, mentally defective and mentally ill. If you do not think like
consensus reality, you can be misdiagnosed. Those who hold different beliefs
are susceptible to being labeled “crazy.” In the name of helping, mental health
professionals can actually do grave harm.

Even the most respected
prominent leaders in the mental health field like National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) Director Thomas Insel has criticized the DSM for going too far and not
being scientifically based, “NIMH will be re-orienting its research away from
DSM categories.” Investigative reporter Robert Whitaker and author of Anatomy
of an Epidemicstated:

When Insel states that the disorders haven’t
been validated, he is stating that the entire edifice thatmodern psychiatry is built upon is flawed,and unsupported by science. . . If the public loses faithin the DSM, and comes to see it as
unscientific, then psychiatry has a real credibility problem onits hands.

Speaking of credibility problem, the latest
misguided revelation from psychiatry in its urgent need to psychopathologize
and label people is that anyone who is discerning about what they ingest in
their bodies for obvious health reasons is also now diagnosable with a mental
disorder. According to the latest version of the bible for clinical
diagnosticians - the DSM-5, a person who demands to know if the food
they consume is a GMO Monsanto-infested poisonous product, they must be
suffering from “Orthorexia nervosa,”a so called condition that is “a
pathological obsession for biologically pure and healthy nutrition.” Another defective label is
currently used on any individual who loses a little memory as part of the
natural aging process short of dementia. They are now suffering from a
psychiatric illness called Mild Neurocognitive
Disorder (MND).

If any young person is a
nonconformist who dares questions authority, they are now quickly diagnosed
with the label Oppositional Defiant
Disorder. Of course a sizeable segment of the more gifted and
creative students in our dumbed down educational system can easily grow
bored with the dull delirium of classroom dogma. Because the slow repetitive
pace in the classroom is clearly not challenging or stimulating enough for the
gifted to avoid becoming restless and antsy, soon deemed a discipline and/or
management problem, they then systematically get mislabeled with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD or ADD) and instantly prescribed
damaging Big Pharma drugs.

Psychiatrist Colin Ross is
a refreshing renegade within his field because he accurately indicts his profession
for pushing drugs to the near exclusion of no longer practicing any
psychotherapy. He expressed his observations regarding his fellow
colleagues in psychiatry:

I also saw how badly biological psychiatrists
want to be regarded as doctors and accepted by therest of the medical profession. In their
desire to be accepted as real clinical scientists, these psychiatrists were
building far too dogmatic an edifice… pushing their certainty far beyond what the
data could support.

I was employed in countless settings where
psychiatrists would routinely arrive at the facility and see twenty or more patients
within an hour or two in a cattle call ritual and then be on their merry way to
their next pit stop, all the way to the bank at the end of the day. Though
there are good psychiatrists and bad psychiatrists in the same way there are
good therapists and bad therapists, my view of the psychiatric profession is
that most are just drug pushing Big Pharma whores.

There is no evidence that
low Serotonin levels are the root cause consistently found in depression. Just
as many people with depression have high levels. It’s been a Big Pharma myth
that antidepressants address “low” Serotonin levels. And then for years we’ve
been hearing about how Prozac and other antidepressants like Paxil and Zoloft
have contributed if not actually caused hundreds of suicides and homicides especially amongst adolescents. The
Journal of the American Medical Association even admitted years ago that the
fourth leading cause of death annually in the US is from medication side
effects. Death from painkillers alone have tripled in the last twenty years. Big Pharma is literally
killing us.

In 2013 the DSM-5 circumvented the rising
criticism that psychiatrists are creating more disorders just so that Big
Pharma can make record setting profits by deceitfully sub-categorizing a litany
of yet even more ways to diagnose more people but technically not significantly
increase the total number of disorders. This calculated manipulation is
symptomatic of the deception that is inherently rampant in the field of
psychiatry as well as our society at large. With the recent decades of
financial crisis, high unemployment, increased poverty and impoverishment,
destabilized family structure, more families struggling to feed themselves and
make ends meet, surrounded by threatening global conflict and war, our
population in fact is becoming more stressed out and the state of this nation’s
mental and emotional health is in fact becoming increasingly unstable. The
combination of our overall population suffering more in conjunction with
increased pathologizing of new diagnoses has actually caused half of
Americans to be diagnosed with at least one mental disorder within
their lifetime. Some critics would argue that virtually everyone can now be
diagnosed with a DSM mental disorder.

This gross over-diagnosing,
misdiagnosing and subsequent over-drugging has reached an epidemic crisis in
America. As a licensed therapist for many years, I encountered this problem
constantly. Psychology/psychiatry is not a science. In contrast,
medical science bases diagnoses on physiological evidence. The mental health
profession bases its diagnoses on unchallenged, bogus premises, preconceived
biases and subjective judgment that have all been proven false. Additionally,
the diagnosis of mental illness too frequently becomes a lifetime sentence
that's severely devaluing, debilitating and needlessly life crippling and
tragic. I always detested the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM) as morally
repugnant and far more damaging than beneficial. In fact, if anything it
engenders a false sense of superiority and potentially a criminally abusive
power within the diagnostician at the complete expense and detriment to the
diagnosed. In short, it offers little to no benefit whatsoever but a whole lot
of harm.

The feeble rationale rigidly
holding onto the dubious notion that the diagnostic system is beneficial
maintains that clustering symptoms of behavior together into an organized
classification system allows for greater understanding that leads to more
accurate diagnoses and subsequent greater treatment efficacy psychiatrically
with prescribing specific Big Pharma drugs to treat specific disorders. I
disagree totally. Misdiagnoses and prescribing drugs that too often only
exacerbate and cause residual permanent damage is the commonplace norm. In very
limited instances I observed drugs reducing symptoms significantly that merit
the outweighed negative effects. Overall I found that both the labeling and the
drugs each do far more damage than good.

This business of branding people with
negative labels as deviant and abnormal that are often internalized and worn
for life, i.e., clients eventually seeing themselves as permanently damaged
goods, certifiably crazy. Diagnoses are simply based on a few fleeting
moments of observable behavior that clinicians subjectively mistake as symptoms
of DSM mental disorders because they are tuned in and trained to see the world
solely through their pathological lens. To me that’s pure BS. Even a halfway
decent healing practitioner looks to find and recognize client’s strengths and
talents and builds on them to raise awareness, enhance self-image and
confidence. It’s the difference between seeing the glass as half full or half
empty with always the half empty assessment producing both a poor prognosis and
usually equally poor treatment results. Stigmatization becomes a lifelong
sentence and albatross that shackles and destroys humans. Society needs to be
educated in order to realize as humans we all possess some degree of flaws and
problems. And just because one might believe someone else has more, they are no
less a person. Increased understanding brings increased compassion.

Both our culture and mental
health profession has long held some serious misconceptions about the taken for
granted veracity of the diagnostic system. It’s been based on fallacies and
pervasive misinformation purposely disseminated for profit. Labeling hapless
individuals with mental disorders while still in their youth causes young
people to identify themselves by their diagnoses and subsequently internalize
their role as mentally ill persons. I saw firsthand the deleterious effects
that labeling had on them. My own experience found those honest and brave
enough to openly display a degree of difficulty adjusting to such a sick, fake
society that breeds mass alienation as ours are actually healthier than those
deemed well-adjusted who thrive in an unhealthy, toxic culture based on social
Darwinism, competitive aggression, greed, deception and amoral blind ambition.
Moreover, I found many of the so called professionals in the mental health
field to be more pathologically “mental” than those they so quickly judge.

More of the blind leading
the less blind a la the gem of a 1967 cult classic called “The King of Hearts.”
The film plot revolves around a French village that’s been hastily abandoned by
the local villagers leaving the normally locked gate of the insane asylum
unlocked while just outside town the two armies of World War I line up to
systematically destroy each other. The beautiful irony of this surrealistic
Fellini-esque world is shown through the joy of living so fully and gently in
the moment by the so called crazy people who in fact are far more skilled and
gifted in the art of living than the so called “normals” in uniform nearby who
are busily annihilating themselves. The moral lesson depicted a penetratingly
deep wisdom that has never rung truer than the madness gripping our
technologically driven, modern world that currently has humanity on a collision
course toward total self-destruction.

Ultimately the diagnostic
labels say far more about the pathology of the so called professional
subjectively judging, or more accurately put, misjudging others according to
their own biases, warped tendencies and misplaced values. Yet unfortunately
this misapplied labeling can give license to abuse and put people permanently
away. As each new revised DSM is issued every few years, the list of mental
disorders keeps growing exponentially. This again says more about those who
come up with so many new ways to misjudge and psychopathologize other human
beings than it does about those being judged. It also indicates a growing
pathology within a sick culture that is so focused on branding others as less
than so called normal, which doesn’t even exist in actual human form since it’s
a mere statistical construct. Yet this is the expected outcome when a sick and
broken political and economic system rotting and decaying morally from within
merges with a sick and broken mental health system that keeps conjuring up such
an extremely twisted and warped lens by which to judge other humans. If it
weren’t so potentially damaging and sinister, it would readily be thoroughly
laughable.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.